The book, which in recent years has trended strongly toward video game records (and, according to us apparently, is a "must-have") found that more American consumers recognized Pac-Man, beating Mario by 1 percent, 94 to 93.

I'd say Mario hasn't done so bad considering not only he has a humanoid form, but he also has changed repeatedly over the past 27 years, whereby Pac-Man has largely been the same yellow pie-shape (except for animated cartoons and other non- or semi-canonical appearances.)

Then again, I don't see Pac-Man putting out a hugely selling title this year, or being the public face of a major console-maker and games publisher. So, take Guinness's appraisal for what it is: The long memory of an entire nation, many of whom might not be gamers.

[via Go Nintendo]

Hack-a-Day says the console has "somewhere around 1200 ROMs" on an SD card inside the case. With the three switches on the front, the user can cycle through them and then flash the title over to the EEPROM inside. The display's size is 2x16.

Atari 2600 Mod Features LCD Selector [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites]

You might know of Shiraz Malik - he's the longtime commenter Spoony Bard here, and he was also our comment ombudsman last year. He's currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and he and his wife are expecting a baby soon.

Although a committed gamer for life, Shiraz is facing some mature decisions on the road to fatherhood, a path that has less time for games, in a household with not much space for them, either. He's written about his decision to sell his video game collection, the nostalgia he feels saying goodbye to those old friends, but knowing there will be new ones as soon, when his son arrives and embarks on his boyhood.

When I was four years old, my dad brought home an Atari 7800. In retrospect, that was his first mistake. I became hopelessly addicted to the wonderful world of video games. I made time for Mario, hung out with Alex Kidd in Miracle World, dreamed about Mega Man while doodling in class, and I soared through the sky with Starfox.

Twenty-six years later, I'm juggling graduate school, married life and a job search, and I still have managed to find the time to get my game on. Somehow I was even able to do some comment moderating for Kotaku in that time, too. Through it all, I've made sure to keep my love of video games alive in some way. But now, we have a new situation.

You see, the day my wife told me that she was pregnant, everything changed. All of a sudden, we're spending our free time taking classes and picking out baby names. Try as I might, the wisdom of hanging on to all of my video games seems to make less sense as time goes by. And in this tough job market, with the mountain of debt school has forced us to carry, we have looked for ways to scrounge up a baby fund.

So after lengthy debate, we decided on my extensive video game collection. I was hoping to hold on to some of my vintage game systems for my future kids, but we simply don't have the space anymore. My wife reminds me that I can play a lot of these games on a virtual console ... but she doesn't understand what game collecting is about. We hardcore gamers take pride in our amassed collections of gaming systems and games; there's just something special about that bygone era when you stayed up all night playing Mega Man II with a friend while your parents were asleep.

Now I look around at the game systems I must sell ... here's my green Xbox Halo Edition along with all my Bioware RPGs ... it has to go. Hey, there's my old N64 ... in college, we played it until the sun came up, and then we played some more. To date, I've never been as good at a single game since Goldeneye. And there goes my silver Gamecube that entertained me and my friends at parties.

I must console (no pun intended) myself with the fact that whatever I make will go towards making sure we can buy my son (yep, it's a boy!) of what he will need, and I certainly hope that one day I can share my love of video games with him along with my other passions. In fact, I've already planned how we're going to watch the Star Wars movies - starting with New Hope and ending with Revenge of the Sith, the only way they should be watched!

But most importantly, I hope he has fond memories of growing up like I did, and if that requires me to expunge some of the things that gave me joy, so be it. In a way, I'm cleaning out my past to make way for his future.

- Shiraz Malik (Spoony Bard)

There's a swell movie poster for this at the link, too. Go check it out.

Dig Dug Trailer [GamerVision, thanks Rachel Marie!]

OK, I didn't. Time was, copy protection didn't inspire such anger in power consumers, probably because the schemes were too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Oh, they were a nag. But holding up a piece of colored film to your screen to read off a secret code, Transformers tech-specs style, was kind of a novelty. My brother and I also repurposed a few codewheels for our own stabs at cryptography

Royal Pingdom took a look back at early forms of PC game copy protection. I'd have to guess that the reason none of these ever raised the kind of anger that DRM does today is because there's no real big brother aspect to it. There were things like parameter codes and read-only copy protection, but nothing was ever put on your machine (although, without a hard drive, I guess it's a moot point). Furthermore, some of these methods - such as the code books or history guides - were at least themed to the game, making them seem like real life extensions.

But it's probably because we were dealing with PC gaming before the explosion of the Internet, and the copying and file sharing over it made publishers get tough, some to the point of heavy-handedness, with protecting their sales.

Wacky Copy Protection Methods from the Good Old Days [Royal Pingdom]

That's right – that thing I'm always going on about is the main selling point of this game: steampunk. Normally, this would be an automatic plus for me if the Victorian corsets are frilly and the airships are spectacular. However, my steampunk standards are high and as some games have proved, genre alone is not enough to sell a game.

What Is It?
Nostalgia is a turn-based RPG that's been out in Japan for the last year or so. Players follow young Eddie, a budding airship pilot/adventurer who goes on a quest to become more of a badass and find his missing father.

What We Saw
I played the demo level of the game twice on the noisy PAX expo floor.

How Far Along Is It?
The game ships October 20.

What Needs Improvement?
You Can't Fast-Forward Text: None of Nostalgia is voiced and there is a lot of reading to do. Rather than let the game decide how fast I can read, I would really rather just mash the A button to bring up all of the text in a text box at once and then mash it again to get rid of it.

Bland Music and Scenery: With the exception of the air travel and most of the menus, the 3D visuals of the 19th Century steampunk world are little dull. London lacked anything resembling Jack the Ripper's era and Cairo was cramped and yellow. The music in the demo level didn't wow me, either – but do bear in mind the background noise of PAX might've had an impact on my auditory impressions.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Airships: Rather than just serving as a fancy mount, airships like Eddie's Maverick make up about half of the gameplay. While in the air and navigating the globe from London to Cairo, random encounters will occur where Eddie and his crew man battle stations on the airship to fight. Each character brings their specific skills to their station, like the mage character can charge up a canon attack, Eddie the melee character can ram the Maverick into an enemy, etc. Enemies can attack in the air from the front, the back or the sides of the airship and according to an Ignition rep, the difficulty level of the encounters changes depending on which of the three levels of altitude your ship is traveling. Aside from that, the ship is fully customizable when you shell out for parts and stuff at stores.

The Overall Look: London and Cairo might've looked a little dull but the character models were so cute. Eddie almost looks like a baby Cloud from FFVII – and I don't think that's an accident. I'm told the dev team that worked on Nostalgia was responsible for bringing FF III and IV to the DS and I appreciate their sense of visual homage.

Final Thoughts
The word nostalgia seldom goes with the word passion. At best, it inspires lukewarm, fuzzy feelings of half-remembered happy things. And for me, that just about sums this game up: I was never passionate about random encounters, but I get a little misty-eyed at the mention of turn-based combat.

Yeah, yeah, taste isn't a temperature. That's been discussed before. Still, this tea service design won some damned tea-off for 2009, and should class up your joint if you are so inclined to buy it. Or serve tea to guests, a lifestyle decision I'm betting is well outside our readership demographic.

Space Invaders Tea Vessel [Gamergrrlz via Gizmodo]

Helpfully the gang at Shamoozal have put together this step-by-step look at rigging up your Nintendo Entertainment System. It's done in the style of the old Disney explainers with Goofy as the hapless, frustrated and frequently maimed subject. And it's funny because, while caricatured to the extreme, we've all done everything depicted in it. Well, maybe not the shoe thing.

How to Hook Up the NES [Shamoozal, thanks Nate D.]

Roenick retired this past week, and Patrick Hruby (Hey! I know that guy!) writes an eloquent tribute to one of the last deities of sports gaming. Roenick had the fortune of being written into a game back when sports titles' gameplay were still loosely based in reality. Of course, none can eclipse Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson. But Roenick's retirement leaves very few of these athletes still active, and blessed to be remembered for otherworldly talents within a video game.

By my count, only two remain: Ken Griffey, Jr., completely superhuman in his eponymous game for the Super Nintendo; and Michael Vick from Madden 2004 probably the only modern game player whose skills just turned everything into a cartoon, like Jackson, or Lawrence Taylor, or the run-and-shoot Houston Oilers of Tecmo.

As sports game developers perfect, incrementally, the realism of games, we will still be able to play as the greatest performers of our time. But their performances will not dominate the screen the way Roenick did in NHL '94. His talent was so pure, white-hot and lasting, it transcended a single sport, and put him and his game into one of the most memorable sequences of a cult classic.

Remembering Jeremy Roenick: The Video Game God [ESPN, via Wired]

This video is "No Escape!" and in addition to its visual style, adds a nice story to make it eminently watchable. The music, self-described as electronic/pop/indie rock, is well-suited to such a 1980s throwback.

No Escape! - from the album "Bits" by Arman Bohn from Distropolis on Vimeo.

The visuals were "created in groundbreaking LD Video at a staggering 96x54 pixels and 256 colors!" Cute, but you can tell a lot of creativity went into it.

If you're interested in the album, the site has links over to iTunes and other online stores.

Armanbohn.com [Site]

That, plus watching a knockoff cast of "Head of the Class" dance their way through World 1-1 got me to bail at 13 seconds. Alright, time for you now.

1989 Nintendo Cereal System Commercial [YouTube]

You don't technically even need color, like these old-school pals. (There is a little bit of red, in the logos; and some color elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, no papercraft game pads are included with these two designs, put up by Cubeecraft.

Papercraft NES and Dreamcast Cost Less, Play Just as Many Cutting Edge Games [Endgadget]

The graphics "suck," the music is "boring" and - I'm not sure if this is a positive or a negative - "it's not as easy as Halo 3 or Call of Duty: World at War," rating it "9 out of 10" on the difficulty-o-meter.

He also doesn't like the fact everything's a one-shot kill. What would he rather play than Contra? Why, Call of Duty and Halo, of course. I'm getting the idea that's all he does play. Well that, and hockey.

Project D: Episode 1 [Nerdballoon]

The Toronto Star waxes nostalgic about moon games in a writeup that spans some of the major games set on the moon, in whole or in part. Naturally, Williams' Moon Patrol stands as one of the granddaddies; Atari's Lunar Lander of 1979 - an arcade port of a game common to PCs before then - was something of an oddity, a science-fiction game that was non-violent. Well, unless you crashed your lander, of course.

In addition to those two, Military Madness, Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge, Duke Nukem 3D, the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and I Wish I Were the Moon are all mentioned for featuring the moon, in whole or in part. I'm certain there are more than just those games. For example, DuckTales' moon level - cited by many as having the greatest level music of the chiptone era.

So what else did the Star miss in the Moon? Think it over, while you play this lunar lander flash game. Or listen to President Kennedy's address of Sept. 13, 1963, one of the best in his campaign to make landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s a national priority. Why, indeed, does Rice play Texas? Maybe InsidiousTuna, as the private-school doormat representative from that state, can tell us.

Glows in Many a Title [The Toronto Star]

Nostalgia basically takes the same sort of airship travel as we've seen in earlier entries in the Final Fantasy series and countless other roleplaying games and pimps it out, letting the player customize weapons and take to the sky for airship battles. The look is similar, as is the music, but the combat is something that hasn't been explored much outside of cut scenes, with the possible exception of Skies of Arcadia.

Donkey Kong for the Atari 400 and 800 was one of the best early ports of an arcade game, and its writer, Landon Dyer, detailed how he built it practically by himself, with no support, reference code, or anything one would expect in a licensing deal. He also revealed the existence of the Easter egg, but incorrectly described how to get it ("something like: Die on the 'sandpile' level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000," he writes.)

Don Hodges, who earlier fixed Pac-Man's notorious kill screen, set to picking apart the Donkey Kong code and finding the egg. He did. It's rather underwhelming, but for posterity's sake, he found the conditions for achieving it.

• Play a game, setting a new high score that is either 37,000, 73,000 or 77,000. The digits for hundred thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones may be anything.

• Kill off all of your remaining lives, but your last death must be by falling.

• Then set the game difficulty to 4 (press the option button 3 times.)

• Wait for the game to cycle through the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen, then at the title screen, the programmer's initials, LMD, will appear. (Pictured above)

That is a set of conditions so specific I can't imagine anyone discovering the egg without prying apart the code, much less knowing how to repeat it. Hodges shows how he found it in the code, using an emulator.

I think the only question remaining is why Dyer made the egg so hard to discover. Certainly other Atari-programmed games of the time had Easter eggs that were not only easier to find, their methods were widely known and circulated.

Donkey Kong Lays an Easter Egg [donhodges.com via Game Set Watch]

Flying airships? Check. Dungeon battles? Check. Plucky young spike-haired anime characters going on a globe-trotting adventure, fighting dragons, wyverns and other unimaginable evils? Check please! Nostalgia's game development pedigree is rock solid and looks to not rock the boat with any of its RPG conventions, perhaps with the exception that's it's set on Earth, spanning real world locations that include New York, London, and Cairo.

The first trailer for Nostalgia is dramatic and cut scene filled. Interested?

RPG Dream Team Delivers Steampunk Nostalgia To The DS [Kotaku]

Released in Japan as Nostalgeo no Kaze, Ignition Entertainment and Tecmo join forces with Matrix Software and Red Entertainment to bring the game stateside as Nostalgia. It's a combination of a unique setting with some of the top talent in old-school RPG development. Players will explore the world of an alternate 19th-century Earth in the role of Eddie, a headstrong Londoner who gathers a group of quirky companions together, travelling the world in a "steampunk-inspired" zeppelin. Players will visit alternate versions of New York, London, Cairo, Africa, and Russia; doing battle in both traditional turn-based combat and massive airship battles.

While the game sounds impressive, the development team's pedigree is even more so.

Developed by Matrix Software (Dragon Quest V PS2, Final Fantasy III-IV DS), in association with Red Entertainment (Gungrave, Bonk, Thousand Arms), Nostalgia brings together a powerful think-tank of old-school Japanese RPG development talent to present a stunning new vision in gaming. Produced by Keisuke Kikuchi (Fatal Frame, Tokobot) and directed by Naoki Morita (Sakura Taisen), with art direction by Yoshiteru Tsujino (Far East of Eden), airship design by Takuhito Kusanagi (Grandia, Blue Submarine No.6, Samurai 7), and enemy design by Keita Amemiya (Iria- Zeiram the Animation, Kamen Rider), Tecmo has amassed an all-star dream team of industry veterans to forge a brand new DS adventure that hearkens back to the classic glory days of Japanese role-playing games.

Nostalgia is due to be released in North America in September of this year. While we await screenshots and the like, feel free to drool lightly over the feature list issued with the official announcement.

Key Game Features:

• Ambitious, fully 3D polygonal graphical engine offers dramatic, sweeping camera angles and impressive vistas rarely seen in a DS title.
• Cohesive, anime-inspired art direction that effectively captures the game's turn-of-the-century charm.
• Travel to incredibly unique, non-traditional RPG locales via airship including London, New York, Cairo, Africa, and Russia.
Features two distinct combat engines: One is a brisk, turn-based close-quarters melee between your party members and monsters; while the other offers thrilling, large-scale airship battles. In addition, your battle skills are scored at the conclusion of each conflict, inspiring strategic mastery.
• Handy in-game notebook feature keeps track of people, monsters, airships and items you've run across. • Plenty of user-defined customization, allowing the player to trick out his or her airship with various weapons, armor types, and special skill attacks. The player can also choose character-specific skills from a branching tree for a more personalized experience.
• Explore a variety of diverse, engaging dungeons that include brain bending puzzles and tricky Indiana Jones-style traps.
• Optional quest system inspires players to approach the adventure from a less linear perspective, extending the life of the gameplay experience.